Sunday, March 21, 2021

Shadows fall over Atlanta: the events of March 16th and Generation Sagittarius

 

Yes!

Every time another mass shooting happens in this gun-happy nation, we go through the same agonizing self-reflections:   

How could this happen? What motivated the killer? Why were these particular victims targeted? We know the only answers that really make a difference (would this have happened without the shooter’s access to guns?), but they beg asking anyway...Why this, why now?  

21-year old Robert Aaron Long was charged with 8 counts of murder, committed on March 16th, between three different massage parlors in the Atlanta, GA area. As for speculations about his motive, according to the AP News:  

“Long told police that Tuesday’s attack was not racially motivated. He claimed to have a “sex addiction,” and authorities said he apparently lashed out at what he saw as sources of temptation. But those statements spurred outrage and widespread skepticism given the locations and that six of the eight victims were women of Asian descent.  

The shootings appear to be at the ‘intersection of gender-based violence, misogyny and xenophobia,’ said state Rep. Bee Nguyen, the first Vietnamese American to serve in the Georgia House and a frequent advocate for women and communities of color.” 

In today’s unfortunate climate of anti-Asian xenophobia—spurred on by Donald Trump’s repeated attempts to demonize China as the origin of the COVID virus—not many people are buying that this mass killing was not about race. That Long would project his own psycho-social wounds onto women in addition is probably also significant, but in the end he didn’t go after just any women—he went after Asian women.  And the only thing that stopped him from killing more of them, by his own admissionwas quick police work.     

Time and place 

There are two relevant charts for the unfolding of this event: even though it was essentially one continuous event, it took place in two different locations, but before we look at those, let’s get some basic facts straight. From the New York Times: 

“Four people died in the first shooting, at Young’s Asian Massage near Acworth, a northwest suburb of Atlanta, Mr. Baker said. That shooting, in which a Hispanic man was injured, was reported around 5 p.m. 

At 5:47 p.m., the Atlanta police said, officers responded to a robbery at Gold Spa in the northeast part of the city, where they found the bodies of three women with gunshot wounds. While the officers were at the scene, the police said, they received a report of shots fired at the Aromatherapy Spa across the street, where they found the body of another woman.” 

Six of the 8 killed were Asian American women—four were confirmed to be ethnic Koreans; the others’ ethnicities are unknown. 

The times noted in the above news report are what I’ve used for Charts 1 and 2 below. The charts speak volumes about the dynamics at work in this particular event, but as we’ll consider after the fact, there’s also a bigger picture at work here. Let’s begin.

 


Chart #1. Massage Parlor attack #1, March 16, 2021, 5:00 p.m.  DST, Acworrth, GA (news reports, Atlanta suburb). Tropical Equal Houses, True Node. All charts courtesy of Kepler 8.0, Cosmic Patterns Software.  

There’s a heavy focus on the 3rd quadrant of this chart (houses 7-9), with a couple key points in the 6th house as well. Sun (chart ruler, with Leo rising) conjoins Venus and Neptune (all Pisces) across the 7-8 cusp. This certainly reflects the death of women (Venus) at the hands of a man (Sun) and it also speaks to the ideology-driven delusions (Neptune) underpinning the attack in the shooter’s mind. Jupiter co-rules Pisces (so co-disposing Sun-Venus-Neptune) from Aquarius, square MC (Taurus), denoting disruption at a place of yin comfort (massage).  

Saturn (Aquarius) squares Uranus (Taurus) and the MC (Taurus); Mars (Gemini) trines Saturn--the shooter admits that he was trying to “eliminate temptation” with his violence, which fits here: his delusion seems to have been that if he could just get rid of the women, he could reimpose order and control over himself (shooter = Mars). This was so wrong and deluded on so many levels; the shooter was not just having a “bad day,” as the Cherokee County sheriff put it; he was caught in some badly twisted (and deadly) thinking. His problem meant 6 women had to die?  

Chiron (Aries) conjoins Ceres (Aries), semi-sextiles Uranus (Taurus) and sextiles Mars (Gemini) and Saturn (Aquarius). Great woundedness around issues of control (Chiron = Mars/Saturn midpoint), perhaps especially around restrictions imposed by home, family or upbringing. If the shooter (Mars) didn’t feel “tempted” (I.e., guilty) about wanting to frequent a massage parlor, those women might still be alive. Uranus (Taurus) speaks to the shocking nature of the attack on women (Venus disposes Taurus).  

Nodal axis (Gemini-Sagittarius) t-squares Vesta (Virgo). Vesta occupies the 1st house here, square the 10-4 Nodal Axis, so placed significantly and perhaps another sign that family upbringing was a factor driving the shooter. The Nodal axis indicates trends of public significance; here, an event or trend involving women, particularly in service jobs that may have sexual undertones (“vestal virgins”). If we stretch the usual orbs a bit, Neptune (Pisces) also figures into this configuration, opposite Vesta, confirming the toxic delusions (I.e., sex addiction) that, by the killer’s admission, were at work.  

Of course, we’re not looking at the shooter’s personal chart here, and that would probably reveal much more about the dynamics at work in his mind, but what we can see in the event chart alone is amazingly relevant.  Let’s examine the second chart for the killings that were reported less than one hour later. 

 


Chart #2. Massage Parlor attack #2, March 16, 2021, 5:47 p.m. DST, Atlanta, GA. (news reports). Tropical Equal Houses, True Node. All charts courtesy of Kepler 8.0, Cosmic Patterns Software.  

Not a lot has changed in the basic orientation of this chart—obviously, it’s only 47 minutes later and not that far from the location in Chart 1. What has changed, however, is significant.  Chart ruler Mercury (Virgo rises) conjoins DSC and Pallas (both Pisces). Also congregated around this potentially volatile point on the horizon are the Sun/Saturn, the Venus/Saturn and the Saturn/Neptune midpoints (all Pisces). Any one of these midpoints here speaks to the situation pretty well, but together they tell a real story—using force and projection to compensate for character weaknesses (Saturn/Neptune), hold women responsible (Venus/Saturn) for controlling self (Sun/Saturn). This is all reinforced by Mars (Gemini) now squaring all these Pisces points at the “enemy”-related DSC—perhaps it’s even significant that Mars is in the youth-related sign of Gemini?   

The bigger picture 

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to Generation Sagittarius lately—the Pluto generation that is now rapidly coming of age before our eyes. These now teens-to-young adults were born between November, 1995 and November, 2008 (roughly) and all but the oldest cohort among them are considered by mainstream social scientists to be part of Gen “Z”. Astrology (much more reasonably, I think) divides generations according to Pluto signs, so that's the approach we’ll use here. I’ve also found it useful to segment a generation’s larger Pluto group into the several Saturn sign cohorts that exist within it. With the Sagittarius generation, that breaks down as follows: 

Pisces November, 1995-April, 1996 

Aries April, 1996-June, 1998 

Taurus June, 1998-August, 2000 

Gemini August, 2000-June, 2003 

Cancer June, 2003-July, 2005 

Leo July, 2005-September, 2007 

Virgo September, 2007-November 2008

Obviously, there are only partial Pisces and Virgo cohorts represented here because of the timing of Pluto’s transit of Sagittarius: when it began, Saturn was already in mid-Pisces and when it ended, Saturn was in mid-Virgo. Notice also that the dates of these Saturn cohorts don’t account for retrograde periods in which there were sign changes (like early in each new Saturn ingress), so some individual cases would differ with this list.  

What this list tells us is that the maturation and development of the young people growing up in each Pluto generation varies somewhat, from Saturn cohort to cohort. Pressures on each cohort are often different, at times quite dramatically, but there is still a generational “thread” that they all have in common. Of course, a disclaimer is in order here: a Pluto generation chart (cast for the time Pluto first ingresses a sign) in no way characterizes every individual within that generation. What the chart does is give us a generational trend line that over time makes sense for that particular collective. Breaking the collective down into Saturn cohorts paints a more targeted picture of these groups, but there are still generalities that may not apply to each individual. 

Think about the cohort born with Saturn in Gemini, for instance—those children could conceivably be heavily imprinted by the Saturn-Pluto opposition that brought us the terror attacks on 9/11/2001. How would this impact children's psyches growing up? Saturn entered Gemini just months after the new Jupiter-Saturn cycle launched at 23° Taurus in late May, 2000. I suspect the expectations they came in with were of a secure material life in this country, yet the nation was about to be roiled with an overseas terrorist threat. Would they grow up expecting violence and disasters to be a normal part of life? If their material lives have been slow to take off (globalization was choking off middle class prosperity quickly at that point), would they grow up feeling resentful, intolerant and aggrieved, eager to “get back at people?” Under the right mix of toxic circumstances, all of these scenarios are completely imaginable.  

Robert Aaron Long, 21, arrested for murdering 8 in Atlanta area.
This is perhaps more relevant to our discussion of the Atlanta massage parlor shootings than we might first think. The shooter in those attacks was 21-year old Robert Aaron Long, so even though we don’t have a birth date for him, we do know that he was born in the year 2000, with Pluto in Sagittarius and Saturn in either Taurus (early in the year) or Gemini (after August). There was an extended retrograde/shadow period in which Saturn revisited Taurus from September, 2000, finally re-entering Gemini in April 2001, so unless Long was born in that small sliver of time during 2000 when Saturn initially stepped into Gemini (late August-early September), his chart is likely to show Saturn in Taurus 

 From what he’s told us about himself (as reported), either sign could make sense, but Taurus really fits the pressures he admitted to being under when he made the fatal choices he did on March 16th.   

Consider that, If he was born with Saturn in Taurus, Uranus would be applying pressure on him these days, perhaps radicalizing his behavior in response to his self-confessed “sex addiction.” Under authority figures who distort this issue and render it toxic for the young people they influence, Saturn can repress healthy sexual expression and make individuals feel that their natural human impulses and needs are “sinful”--certainly a formula for unhealthy relationships and confusion in vulnerable young adults.  

The Washington Post reports on Long’s potential motives for his murderous rampage: 

“Robert Aaron Long's family had finally had it. Long, 21, was so obsessed with sex — watching hour upon hour of pornography online, visiting the kinds of spas where the customers bought ‘massages with happy endings’ — that on Monday night, his parents kicked him out of the house, according to police and a friend who confirmed the account. 

The next day, police said, Long bought a handgun. And then, as dusk fell over metropolitan Atlanta on Tuesday evening, Long launched himself on what authorities say was a premeditated trail of terror. He drove to three Atlanta-area Asian spas, where he shot nine people, killing eight of them.  

He was on a mission, he would later tell police, to stem his addiction to sex. The spas were ‘a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate,' said Capt. Jay Baker, a spokesman for the Cherokee County sheriff’s office.” 

That he didn’t understand killing Asian women was not the way to achieve his goal is another story, and the key to what I’ve been calling the “bigger story” here. It didn’t seem to occur to him that those women weren’t responsible for his problem. Did he expect his parents to approve of his actions, or was his plot to go on an extended, interstate killing spree just one big case of getting back at his parents for throwing him out of the house? Was he aiming to shame them, or did that never enter his mind? Why did he assume that killing Asian women and terrorizing the entire Asian-American community in this country was the only solution? The answers to these questions would help us narrow down the dynamics at work, but they would, of course, be little comfort to the Asian-American community.  

Clearly, some pathology existed in Long’s thinking, and perhaps in the environment he grew up in, but this thinking had to have been formed in him over time by many influences, both personal and societal. He’s no victim here—don't get me wrong—he chose to do what he did and he’s fully responsible. By the age of 21, there are no excuses.  But maybe society and all that goes into that is responsible, too.

On the heels of a record bad year 

The bigger picture is troubling in this case because the March 16th attacks happened on the heels of a very bad year for anti-Asian violence in this nation. From NBC News and an organization known as “Stop AAPI Hate:” 

“New data has revealed over the past year, the number of anti-Asian hate incidents — which can include shunning, slurs and physical attacks — is greater than previously reported. And a disproportionate number of attacks have been directed at women. 

The research released by reporting forum Stop AAPI Hate on Tuesday revealed nearly 3,800 incidents were reported over the course of roughly a year during the pandemic. It’s a significantly higher number than last year's count of about 2,800 hate incidents nationwide over the span of five months. Women made up a far higher share of the reports, at 68 percent, compared to men, who made up 29 percent of respondents. The nonprofit does not report incidents to police.” 

It’s not rocket science to deduce that Donald Trump’s xenophobic attempts to offload responsibility for his poor handling of the pandemic onto China, as the “origin” of the COVID virus, is probably largely responsible for the rise in hate crimes detailed above in the past year. That’s Trump’s modus operandi: he tears others down and endangers them with lies and innuendos to relieve himself of responsibility—why shouldn’t Robert Aaron Long hold Asian women responsible for his problem 

Xenophobia has been Trump's stock-in-trade since day one.
I have no idea what this young man’s politics are, but his behavior certainly fit this particular Trumpian dynamic. Trump has made a political career out of drilling it into his followers that they’re victims of people trying to get into the U.S. from across any of our borders, from people of color, from the “Chy-na virus,” and so on. How could young people who look up to him for god knows what reason not come out of it with twisted ideas about responsibility and tolerance?  

The same dynamic drove Trump’s followers to attack the Capitol on January 6th—Congress was about to “steal...their election.” Huh? Vulnerable young people like Long have been minnows on Trump’s fishing hook, but what all of these followers don’t understand is that they will pay the price for their irresponsible actions, not Trump. Trump’s twisted views of responsibility simply don’t hold up in a court of Law, as the insurrectionists are finding out, and as Long is now finding out, being charged with 8 counts of murder.    

This makes me wonder if we are at a dangerous generational crossroads with children born into that dicey turn-of-the-21st-century period, with so many of them now coming of age, armed and angry. The pandemic isn’t helping here, either—it's seems to have created all kinds of pockets of pent-up energies that threaten to explode at some point.  We’ve always taken for granted that families will (with inevitable few exceptions) raise their children with some semblance of a moral code. That basic universal moral principles such as the Golden Rule would have gotten through to them somehow, in the course of growing up, attending school, church and so on.   

Yet, the past couple decades have overturned those expectations in far too many cases. Dylann Roof was 21 years old when he attended a Bible study at Mother Emanuel Baptist church in Charleston, S.C., only to kill 9 of the African-American congregants who made him welcome there. A self-confessed Neo-Nazi and white supremacist, he wanted to “ignite a race war,” he said 

Nikolas Cruz was 19 in 2018 when he brought his high-powered rifles into Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, massacred 17 students and then turned the gun on himself. Two more of the students targeted that day have died of suicide since then, unable to deal with the post-traumatic stress. Cruz, who had a history of being emotionally troubled and learning disabled, had lost his adoptive parents shortly before he attacked the school. There were known reasons why this young man should have never been allowed to own a gun, in other words—despite multiple efforts and months of protest by the survivors of Cruz’s rampage since then, the political will to restrict gun ownership according to sane laws has consistently failed.  

 

No one has been forced to adopt Trump’s amoral approach to life in society, but his macho bravado and refusal to admit responsibility for anything has appeal for impressionable young people, especially young men. Maybe Trump has filled a void for some who need a male figure to emulate and don't have the clear, informed judgement to see through Trump’s act. Maybe these kids—often stuck in nowhere jobs (if they’re employed at all), unable or unwilling to get a college education—need to feel validated, so they seek out fellow travelers on extreme social media outlets where they feel free to vent and are egged on by influencers like Fox News and more extreme voices, to blame the government for their failures to thrive. 

 It’s not difficult to see how this combination of elements would lend itself to the serious upsurge we’ve seen in hate groups across the nation. If their white race becomes the only reality left to them that makes these young people feel “superior” to others, it’s all too easy for race to become a problem.  

Kids caught up in these toxic dynamics are certainly not the majority of young Americans, and indeed, Long and some around him continue to claim that he was not by nature, a racist or a “hater.” His own church has disavowed his actions in strong terms and has initiated a process for removing him from their congregation. According to the Washington Post: 

“’We want to be clear that this extreme and wicked act is nothing less than rebellion against our Holy God and His Word,’ the statement said, adding: ‘We can no longer affirm that he is truly a regenerate believer in Jesus Christ.’”  

The phrase “too little too late” comes to mind here—this same report notes that this church was also known to teach the view that: 

“adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, polygamy, pedophilia, pornography, or any attempt to change one’s sex, or disagreement with one’s biological sex” [are] “sinful and offensive to God.” 

So, what’s the solution in a conflicted situation like this? We can’t excuse Long’s actions—and indeed, we shouldn’t shrink from defining them as hate crimes, no matter what he claims as motives—but we can certainly start to appreciate their multiple layers, and the forces that can create hate, even if it’s disguised as something else. The implications of Long’s actions are personal, social and even more broadly collective all at once. Why was Long able to walk into a store and buy a handgun the very day he planned to massacre people? Because in many states there are no regulations that safeguard against impulse crimes. Who’s responsible for that? 

Then there’s the domestic terrorism/hate crime aspect to the whole thing: Atlanta apparently has massage parlors run by non-Asians too...on what basis did Long target all Asian-run facilities? Could it be that those public and family voices who want to focus on Long’s “sex addiction” are eager to throw up a smokescreen around the racism in their communities? That sounds about right in a state that’s simultaneously working to pass multiple voter suppression bills through its legislature as we speak, but certainly wouldn’t admit to the obvious racist underpinnings of those bills. Or maybe racism is so normalized in their communities that it doesn’t even seem to be there at all? From the Brookings Brief: 

“At times, people use racism and the racialization of people as a way to act out their frustrations with the world. Roughly 75% of domestic terrorist acts are committed by right-wing extremists and 75% of them are committed by white nationalists and white supremacists. Domestic terrorism is so concerning that the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security have classified domestic violent extremism to be the biggest threat for mass violence in the United States. But in order for us to recognize these acts as hate crimes, we have to ensure that racist perspectives are not brushed aside as normal (emphasis added). We also have to change statutes.” 

Is every person born within the Pluto in Sagittarius generation subject to the same torments that Long claims to be suffering? Is the entire huge group racist? Far from it on both counts, but there may be a few nuggets of insight about this young man’s tragic story in that generation’s “nativity.” We may also find some insights into why the trend in hate crimes is so disastrously high.  

 


Generation fire: Pluto in Sagittarius 

To put this part of the exploration into context, we’ll examine the Pluto ingress chart for Generation Sag next to Chart #1 above. This does, indeed, raise the stakes and answer some key questions. Let’s begin.

 


Biwheel #1: (inner wheel) Pluto ingresses Sagittarius, January 17, 1995, 4:08 a.m. ST, Washington, D.C.; (outer wheel) Massage Parlor attack #1, March 16, 2021, 5:00 p.m.  DST, Acworrth, GA (news reports, Atlanta suburb). Tropical Equal Houses, True Node. All charts courtesy of Kepler 8.0, Cosmic Patterns Software. 

Interchart Grand Mutable Square: Pluto-in-Sag (Gen) Pluto-conjunct Jupiter-conjunct Venus rises across Gen ASC, and all this opposes Gen DSC and Attacks Mars (Gemini); this axis squares Attacks Mercury-Pallas and Gen Saturn (all Pisces) opposite Gen Mars (Rx, Virgo). It’s hard to miss the presence of Mars in both axes of this grand square—given the situation represented here, both the violence (Attack Mars) and the health and wellbeing of males in Generation Sag (Gen Mars Rx opp Gen Saturn) are in focus. In fact, the crisis with young males in this country, which coexists strongly with a widely acknowledged mental health crisis, has been recognized at the highest levels. From a July, 2019 article in USA Today: 

“In an astonishing disclosure about the two greatest dangers to the future of America’s economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell revealed on CBS' "60 Minutes" last month the peril posed by “young males”: young males not looking for work; being addicted to drugs (think opioid crisis); and being unprepared for the transition to technology. Powell posits that this economic problem is also a national security problem. He implies that we ignore this crisis at our own peril. Yet his warning is ignored.” 

Before the pandemic hit and forced a good percentage of women to leave their jobs and careers for the sake of their children, women and girls were making great strides in professional life and education, but their setbacks seem to be temporary, whereas the setbacks men and boys have suffered seem to have deeper, more complicated roots, and the problem is not being felt in the U.S. only. The USA Today article elaborates: 

“It is a crisis of education. Worldwide, 60% of the students who achieve less than the baseline level of proficiency in any of the three core subjects of the Program for the International Assessment are boys. Even boys’ IQs are dropping. 

It is a crisis of mental health. Boys’ suicide rate goes from only slightly more than girls before age 15 to three times that of girls’ between 15 and 19, to 4 1/2 times that of girls between 20 and 24. Mass shooters, prisoners and Islamic State terrorism recruits are at least 90% male.” 

Notice that Gen Mars Rx falls in the 9th house of the generational chart here, so yes, there’s a point being made about education here. The 9th is ruled by the Sun (Leo cusp), with the Sun conjunct both Uranus and Neptune (all in Capricorn) in this chart—heavy expectations are placed on this 9th house realm, but there’s also a feeling that this generation is caught up in an international turning point (the onset of globalization?) that not everyone would be equally capable of navigating. We were told from the beginning by globalization boosters that there would be “winners and losers,” but they forgot to tell us that a whole generation of young men—critical to the future of this nation—might be put at risk. That “Rx” after this generation’s Mars was perhaps weightier than it first looks.  

 

A loss of potency and possibility for any sector in society is a reliable recipe for trouble: inevitably, some of those who feel at risk will grasp for anything that makes them feel more in charge, more powerful. They’ll adopt what they feel are the exterior signs of power: tattoos, macho clothing, guns, big rig vehicles. They’ll adopt hateful attitudes and crude manners. They emulate the "strong men" that grab their attention, whether those figures deserve attention or not.

And/or they will simply immerse themselves in escapist fantasies: video games, pornography, drugs, and for those looking to find someone to blame for their lack of forward movement, misogyny (Attacks Mars opposes Gen Venus-Jupiter), nationalism and white supremacy. They’ll lash out at the forces they believe are holding them back (Gen Saturn opp Gen Mars Rx), especially the “Government,” and react accordingly. Just as so many young men in this generation were approaching adolescence and political awakening in the late 2000s, along came Trump and company to give them “direction.” Anti-government militia membership has been at record highs during the Trump administration: Trump, with his famous “stand back and stand by” nod to these groups during Election 2020, seemed to treat them like his political protection force. Young men need direction, and as the world found out only too heinously under Hitler, they can be used for the worst possible purposes by charismatic megalomaniacs.   

Notice the amazing convergence of Attack Pluto (Capricorn) with Gen Sun-Uranus-Neptune (Capricorn) and this Pluto’s trine to Gen MC-Chiron (Virgo). If you’ve been following recent outer planetary transits, you’ll know that Saturn and Jupiter both passed over all these late Capricorn points in the past year on their way to forming their new Aquarius cycle. In the process, they each launched new Capricorn cycles with Pluto, all trine to Gen MC-Chiron. This will hopefully open up new possibilities for this generation in the economy and in the social order, but there will be those who remain wounded (Gen Chiron) in the process. This generation is equipped pretty well for taking on big, transcendent challenges (Sun-Uranus-Neptune), but Gen Saturn, disposing all those Capricorn points, isn’t at it strongest in Neptunian Pisces. It’s quite possible that Neptune’s current transit through its home sign (since 2011) has been rough on those in this generation who are most sensitive to Neptune, or who have dominant mutable energies in their individual charts.  

Attacks Moon-Uranus (Taurus) conjoins Gen Pallas (Taurus), squares Gen Moon (Leo) and inconjoins Gen Venus-Jupiter (Sagittarius). These aspects reflect how focused the violence on March 16th was on women; Long may have been acting from some irrational, but deeply-rooted feeling that he would be serving Justice (Pallas) on the women he targeted by shooting them. This feeling may or may not have anything to do with race in his conscious thinking, but somewhere in the essential core of his being, he seems to have felt these women had no right to live if they made him feel uncomfortable.  

Was that feeling racially or gender-based? It could very well be either or both, but that will be up to the prosecutors to prove and the juries to decide. To my mind, he is also responsible, consciously or not, for the terror his actions have inspired in the Asian community at large, and that’s a hate crime.  

 

 


Final thoughts 

In the end, this sordid case of violence against eight victims in Atlanta-area massage parlors is a much bigger story than it first appears. It is tethered to so many other developments in America these days, including our nearly-completed Sibly Pluto return. It's no coincidence that the Sun-Uranus-Neptune conjunction in the Generation Sagittarius chart is almost exactly conjunct Sibly Pluto and that this generation would be coming of age around this critical period.  This generation of young people is our future, and with our seeming inability to truly resolve this country’s karmic baggage with race, and our refusal to get dead serious and real about climate change, we have laid at least two unforgivable burdens on their future and on the generations that come after them.  

A great many of these young people are already working hard on these dual challenges, but a certain percentage is ill-equipped by a host of factors and are just angry and flailing around, looking for someone to blame for the dead ends their lives have become. Truth is, our Pluto return isn’t going to let us shove all this under the fiscal rug and resume normal capitalistic practices, as if the future will take care of itself. The growth of domestic terror is the number one threat to this nation right now, we’re told, and it didn’t grow out of nowhere. It grew out of inattention to critical human needs. And it’s not showing signs of going away.  In the wake of the attack of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, FBI Director Christopher Wray issued a stark warning about this threat. From APNews:  

“The violence at the Capitol made clear that a law enforcement agency that remade itself after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to deal with international terrorism is now laboring to address homegrown violence by white Americans. President Joe Biden’s administration has tasked his national intelligence director to work with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to assess the threat. And in applying the domestic terrorism label to conduct inside the Capitol, Wray sought to make clear to senators that he was clear-eyed about the scope and urgency of the problem. 

In quantifying the scale of the FBI’s work, Wray said the number of domestic terrorism investigations has increased from around 1,000 when he became director in 2017 to roughly 1,400 at the end of last year to about 2,000 now. The number of arrests of white supremacists and other racially motivated extremists has almost tripled, he said.” 

Fueling the flames of the anger underlying this trend and threat is, of course, social media, the grievance super-highway that grew up alongside Generation Sagittarius.   

On the other hand, we’re talking about young people who are under tremendous stress these days, so simply decrying their anger and treating them like threats is not going to serve any of our purposes. A recent report by the American Psychological Association speaks to the generalized stress we’re all experiencing under the pandemic, but does have some interesting points to make about adolescents and young adults as well: 

“Loneliness and uncertainly about the future are major stressors for adolescents and young adults, who are striving to find their places in the world, both socially, and in terms of education and work. The pandemic and its economic consequences are upending youths’ social lives and their visions for their futures,” said Emma Adam, PhD, Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Education and Social Policy. “We must work to provide social, emotional and mental health supports to this generation, while providing much-needed financial assistance and educational and work opportunities for youth. Both comfort now and hope for the future are essential for the long-term well-being of this generation.” 

Plans afoot in the Biden administration to at least partially relieve the stress of student debt may be a good start, but much more is needed to head off the worst case scenarios for this generation. It should concern all of us that the young men in any given generation are at risk—they haven’t stopped being important to our future just because there’s been a surge of progress among young women and girls. IMHO, we need to attack this fundamentally toxic thinking—women and men are not on some cosmic “see-saw” of power and strength that requires one to be down for the other to be up; what part of the necessary balancing act between Mars and Venus do we not get? Mars rules both Aries and Scorpio (yang and yin); Venus rules both Taurus and Libra (yin and yang): our concerns inter-are, as Buddhists might say. We need each other; we are each other. Hate destroys all. Love builds and nurtures all.  

The current situation, as illustrated by this week’s events around Atlanta and the larger context of post-January 6th America, is simply not sustainable, but I am heartened by the outpouring of support for the Asian-American community that followed this week. It’s far from enough, of course, but out of Darkness may yet come Light.  

If we want it badly enough. 

 


Raye Robertson is a practicing astrologer, writer and former educator. A graduate of the Faculty of Astrological Studies (U.K.), Raye focuses on mundane, collective-oriented astrology, with a particular interest in current affairs, culture and media, the astrology of generations, and public concerns such as education and health. Several of her articles on these topics have been featured in The Mountain Astrologer and other publications over the years; see the Publications tab on the home page for her two most recent publications, A Silver Lining in Aquarius: Engineering the Future with the 2020 Jupiter-Saturn cycle, and Pluto’s Sibly Return: Revisiting Paine’s Common Sense for Transformational Times..  

  

For information about individual chart readings, contact: robertsonraye@gmail.com 

  

© Raye Robertson 2021. All rights reserved.